Journalists and, well, mainly other journalists are mourning the loss of Google Reader, a news aggregating RSS reader which will be euthanised today.
The Chocolate Factory will close the Reader software as of midnight tonight, California time, forcing RSS fans to find a new service.
Mostly, people appear to be turning to …

It's not easy, being green

Feedly has, at the moment, no Android widget. Which is what I'll be missing most from Reader. I had the same widget on my phone homescreen and my tablet homescreen so I could scan and choose the stories I wanted to read without diving into the app. Feedly, apparently, will be popping out a new widget on the 10th, I only hope it's better than their last widget.

I might give some of the newer ones a try, many didn't exist when the cull was announced but feedly is an OK, if not perfect replacement at the moment. Tomorrow will be the real test, when I can't see what's in my feeds without opening the feedly app.

Re: It's not easy, being green

Feedly does in fact have an Android widget – it's just terrible and only shows the latest headline in a gigantic square and assumes pretty pictures are to accompany the feed.

A few nights ago, I found a reader application called gReader that can hook into Feedly through OAuth but looks and behaves much like Google Reader's app and widget. There's a free version of the application on the Play Store, but the widget doesn't work unless you pay for the "Pro" version, despite showing various widgets as being available.

Link to the free version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noinnion.android.greader.reader

I'm not precisely a fan of the number of permissions it requires, but I took the gamble and paid the $5 for the "Pro" version just to maintain my status quo reading news from my home screen. I'd really recommend trying the free version out fully before taking the plunge if the cost matters to you. Oh, and don't blame me if it eats your dog – I didn't write it.

Netvibes - but the mobile version seems broken

Quite happy with Netvibes, except for a few oddities, Such as sometimes you marking all articles as read, only to see that it has not marked anything and the list is exactly the same. And oddly enough, the mobile site (mobile.netvibes.com) version seems down for the last couple of days at least. What a bad moment.

Firefox live bookmarks

Firefox can use RSS feeds for live bookmarks. Firefox sync syncs the read items across devices. Never seen the need for Google Reader, except as an Android widget (hopefully feedly will fix theirs soon)

who cares

Who is losing out?

I used to be logged in all day to reader, which would mean Google get all my searches. Without reader I don't have the incentive to be logged in. So with my cookies being cleared when I closer my browser seems to me that Google are losing out more than me.

Re: Who is losing out?

It was exactly the same for me; I was logged in all day mainly because of Reader, and now I no longer have any incentive to do so. However, I used it via the iGoogle gadget, so it was part of my browser home page - and that gadget stopped working for me on 28th June, which annoyed me greatly: Last time I checked, 28th June != 1st July.

So now, not only does Google lose my log-in, it's no longer even my default search engine by token of being my browser's default home page. Hello DuckDuckGo.

my recommendation Pulse reader

Its technically not a simple lightweight text only RSS reader but my recommendation for a polished news scraper on your phone or tablet is the app Pulse reader. Of course its only available for Android and iOS but considering the rest of the mobile market is a rounding error that shouldn't matter.

Re: my recommendation Pulse reader

Hey it looks like you can import all your google reader feeds into it as well. From what I understand though Pulse is not the best solution Web wise on the desktop I guess. Tend to consume most of my news through my phone.

Meh.

My Motorola Defy had a nice boring braindead simple RSS reader that did exactly what it said on the tin (and nothing else).

Google Reader app looked nice'n'flashy, but seemed pathologically inclined to try to download everything repeatedly even if nothing had changed, and in the case of some services, to present me with a list of thousands of items pulled from the BBC RSS feeds I used to look at. I dunno, the BBC feeds themselves don't have that much stuff in them, I think Google Reader just kept retrieving and adding the newly found stuff to what was there even if nothing changed.

If any Android devs are reading - what I'd like is a simple RSS reader that I can set up with a list of feeds (ElReg, Hanners Anime Blog, BBC news, etc) and tapping a feed will list what is in it, tapping the item will either open it in a browser or expand it to display anything that didn't fit in the little list entry with a click-to-read (depending on how much work you fancy doing; styles and icons optional too! and don't bother to remember unread items, just show what's in the RSS file). Nothing else. No social networking integration, no Facebook "LIKE", no it-does-twitter-too. Just simple, boring, functional. Any takers?

Re: When's it due to end again?

inoreader

I used The Old Reader for about six weeks, but it was unreliable, slow and frequently very late --- it seemed to have a really sluggish update cycle. Plus it occasionally spammed me with huge swathes of previously read posts.

But then I discovered inoreader, at http://inoreader.com, and have been very pleased with it; it's a pure web app and doesn't need any local installation, it's got a simple user interface that's very like Google Reader but with lots of configuration options behind the scenes; it's fast to update; it's free; and it's got excellent keyboard navigation (including an 'open in background tab' button!).